Breast Feeding Best Friends

Laika is almost 6 weeks old now. We are still breastfeeding. What made all of this possible? These are our tools:

1. We have already talked about our Philips Avent Isis iQ Uno. How is our relationship with it? Good and bad. Good, because it is still what I am using. Bad, because its motor got busted after two days of using it six times daily. I used to use it only as a supplement to my direct feeding. But when we shifted to pumping daily, the motor gave up. We have yet to bring it to the service center. Good thing it has an option for manual pumping. That's what I am using now. Let's just pray I don't get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

Husband felt bad as he bought it for P13,000 in Market!Market! But lookie here. Yup, almost half off. Just our luck.

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2. I ordered the Mommy Treats Oatmeal and White Chocolate Chip Cookies. The cookies were delivered two days after I ordered online. And as a bonus, the seller gave me a sample of her Cupcake Bites. I must say, both variants are yummy.

So, how was it? I will let the pictures do the talking.

My expressed milk before eating Mommy Treats' Lactation Cookies

My expressed milk a day after eating Mommy Treats' Lactation Cookies

The cookies are so effective, I even had to stop eating after the third day (I ordered a week's supply) as I had an oversupply.

3. Before I got my lactation cookies, I bought Mother's Milk Tea from Healthy Options in Trinoma.

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My review: It does not taste good. And the lactation cookies arrived the day after so I only got to drink this tea once. I don't know if it's effective and I will gladly just eat my lactation cookies instead. But it's good to have this as a backup.

4. I got impatient having to pump just one breast at a time with my Avent Breast Pump so we bought a Spectra 3 breast pump from BabyMama. The site sells it as an electric, double breast pump. The only downside, it cannot be battery-operated. And personally, I prefer the mobility of my manual Avent pump.

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5. I also bought other accessories from BabyMama like their Cooler Pouch and some Ice Packs for when we are not in the house.

6. I never got the reason behind having a nursing pillow. But when carrying Laika became too painful for my wrist, I dreamt of having a Boppy pillow.

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My husband bought me a nursing pillow from Landmark. It costs less than P500 compared to the (I think) P2000-4000 price tag of the Boppy. For now, it serves its purpose.

My nursing pillow from Landmark Trinoma

It is shaped slightly different from the Boppy. So even if the Boppy comes with a warning that you can't have your baby sleep with the pillow, we get to have Laika sleep on our nursing pillow. Plus, if I had it after immediately after giving birth, I could have used it as a cushion for when I sit on hard surfaces (normal delivery hurts down there!).

For now, these are my tools. What else can you suggest?

On breastfeeding and bottlefeeding

Even before we had a baby, heck, even before we got pregnant, my husband talked me into breastfeeding exclusively. He is a strong believer in providing nourishment that has been given naturally to a mother. Being the good wife that I am (hahaha), I knew from the very start that I will be breastfeeding my soon-to-be-born child. But don't get me wrong. I don't judge people who decide to formula feed their babies. I believe in doing whatever works for you and the baby. I do judge, on the other hand, people who judge formula-feeding mothers. Does that even make sense?

Anyway, my baby is now 3 weeks old and I am proud to say that she has only taken in milk that came from me. That is, except for her first 2 days in the world when the nurses in St. Lukes Global City, where she was confined for the first 3 days of her life in the NICU (more on that on other blog posts), took it upon themselves to feed her glucose water. Upon finding out about this, my husband told the nurses to stop this and we started visiting her every 3 hours round the clock since then to stimulate my breasts to produce milk.

I regret not having read much about breastfeeding as much as I did about pregnancy. Husband told me I should stop regretting and instead look at this as an opportunity for me to share what I know now. I've listed some of them below:

• I didn't know I should have started having baby latch to me as early as possible to stimulate milk production. 
• I didn't know it is okay to not have milk the first few days as baby has food reserves from when she was in my belly (milk came in 3 days after baby was born). 
• I should have known having a supportive partner is essential in this (of which I am very lucky to have). 
• I should have known and read about engorgement and how much it hurts like hell!
• I should have purchased a breast pump before I gave birth. This has been a very worthy investment for us.

After reading much about breast pumps when I was pregnant, we decided on getting an Ameda Purely Yours Breast Pump because of the great reviews.  But because it is not readily available in malls here and to have one, I would have to purchase it online, we weren't able to buy this one.

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Because of engorgement and my postpartum condition, my husband had to buy one immediately after we were discharged from the hospital. He went to Market! Market! and I asked him to buy an Avent Isis iQ Uno Breast Pump. It also had great reviews but it is more expensive and it only has one pump. The good thing is it can also be used manually and can be battery-operated. At present, it is my best friend in the world!

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Just yesterday, for the first time ever, we gave in and bottled-fed Laika using my expressed milk. We believe breast milk is still good in whatever form it comes in. We use Philips Avent and Tommee Tippee bottles. Before then, we tried giving expressed milk through medicine dropper. We originally didn't want to introduce bottles yet to avoid nipple confusion but we had to as Laika and I had latching issues. It also hurts too much!

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Of the two, I prefer Tommee Tippee more as it is slow-flow. We also had zero problems on nipple confusion as I still feed her directly from time to time and she has more efficient latch as compared to before. I noticed that she also feeds more now that we introduced bottles to her. My problem now is my milk supply can't keep up. I ordered lactation cookies from Mommy Treats and it will be delivered tomorrow. I will be making a review once it gets here.